Top 60 Chris Bohjalian Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Remember that person you wanted to be? There’s still time.”

— Chris Bohjalian

2. “Life is filled with small moments that seem prosaic until one has the distance to look back and see the chain of large moments they unleashed.”

— Chris Bohjalian

3. “A single, ordinary person still can make a difference – and single, ordinary people are doing precisely that every day.”

— Chris Bohjalian

4. “With age comes acumen. With experience comes insight.”

— Chris Bohjalian

5. “You can repair anything but dead. You can’t fix that. So you bury the dead an move on.”

— Chris Bohjalian

6. “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them. – Margaret Atwood.”

— Chris Bohjalian

7. “But history does matter. There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Bosnians and the Rwandans. There are obviously more, but, really, how much genocide can one sentence handle?”

— Chris Bohjalian

8. “And though some days it is very hard, I try not to live for the future. And I try not to dream of the past.”

— Chris Bohjalian

9. “Food is a gift and should be treated reverentially – romanced and ritualized and seasoned with memory.”

— Chris Bohjalian

10. “But it’s funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just belive whatever we want.”

— Chris Bohjalian

11. “No one said living isn’t a pretty chancy business, Sibyl. No one gets out of here alive.”

— Chris Bohjalian

12. “My wife and I would be very comfortable having a baby at home or using one of the terrific nurse-midwives at the hospital.”

— Chris Bohjalian

13. “Elena believed that reportage like that might be compelling and beautiful, but it would never gain traction in the Age of the Troll. In the Age of Mass Shootings. In the Age of the Suicide Bomb in the Crowd.”

— Chris Bohjalian

14. “Supposedly, whatever we do that’s selfish goes with us to the grave; whatever we do that’s selfless lives on.”

— Chris Bohjalian

15. “But history does matter. There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Serbs and the Rwandans.”

— Chris Bohjalian

16. “The message, if you think about it this way, is all about taking chances because fate or destiny or God will protect you. Take a risk, have a little faith. It’s all about life, not death.”

— Chris Bohjalian

17. “Even a magnificent city such as Florence becomes more intriguing if there is a demon at work in the alleys.”

— Chris Bohjalian

18. “She talks and talks because whenever she is silent she finds herself looking at him and her breath grows a little short.”

— Chris Bohjalian

19. “I have lived with magic and without magic, and I can tell you with certainty that a life with magic is better...”

— Chris Bohjalian

20. “We may talk a good game and write even better ones, but we never outgrow those small wounded things we were when we were five and six and seven.”

— Chris Bohjalian

21. “Tsunamis. School shootings. Syria. We watch it, we read about it, and then we move on. As a species, we’re either very resilient or super callous. I don’t know which.”

— Chris Bohjalian

22. “When it seems you have nothing at all to live for, death is not especially frightening.”

— Chris Bohjalian

23. “He recalls what that first German soldier said to his major: No God-not yours or mine-approves of what you’re doing.”

— Chris Bohjalian

24. “I’m not sure I can think of anything sadder than a homeless person with a homeless dog.”

— Chris Bohjalian

25. “If you were Bill Clinton, how did you justify Monica Lewinsky to Chelsea? What did you say about the cigar and the beret and the little blue dress? If you were Anthony Weiner, how in the world did you explain to your daughter your apparently insatiable need to text pictures of your junk to strange women?”

— Chris Bohjalian

26. “You want to know the definition of a consultant? A guy who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is.”

— Chris Bohjalian

27. “But if you are a person who needs no one’s approval, you are probably crazy and live alone on an island or the top of a mountain somewhere.”

— Chris Bohjalian

28. “My mother used to talk about passages and, once in a while, about ordeals. We all have them; we are all shaped by them. She thought the key was to find the healing in the hurt.”

— Chris Bohjalian

29. “During the war, I promised the dead I would never forget them. I stared at them, barely able to move myself. Pretended I was one of them. To this day I can recall the light in the ruins.”

— Chris Bohjalian

30. “You can repair anything but dead. You can’t fix that.”

— Chris Bohjalian

31. “She did it because it was, like so much else that made her happy, dangerous and self-destructive and just a little bit sick.”

— Chris Bohjalian

32. “My grandparents, like many genocide survivors, took most of their stories to their graves.”

— Chris Bohjalian

33. “Stories, after all, are merely memories given a certain tangibility with words, and it only takes a few words to subsume a memory completely.”

— Chris Bohjalian

34. “Did you ever read Carlo Levi?” “No.” “You should – if you like Tolstoy. He wrote beautifully about Italian peasants. My people, once. He had a soul like Tolstoy. ‘The future has an ancient heart.’ I think I have that right.”

— Chris Bohjalian

35. “Remember that person you wanted to be? There’s still time.” She wanted to believe that; she wanted to believe it almost desperately. She wanted to be different from what she was – to be anything but what she was. But every day that grew less and less likely. Life, it seemed to her in the back of the cab, was nothing but a narrowing of opportunities. It was a funnel.”

— Chris Bohjalian

36. “It was Aldous Huxley who observed, “Every man’s memory is his private literature.”

— Chris Bohjalian

37. “But for most of the world- for most of Vermont- the Cape Abenaki meltdown is just another bit of old news. Tsunamis. School shootings. Syria. We watch it, we read about it, and then we move on. As a species, we’re either very resilient or super callous. I don’t know which.”

— Chris Bohjalian

38. “My dad and Patricia viewed my decision to become a vegetarian largely in terms of the way it seemed to complicate their dinner menus.”

— Chris Bohjalian

39. “Sometimes I believe we would all be better off if we always treated people like this was the last time we were ever going to see them.”

— Chris Bohjalian

40. “She knew that most men desired her because she was attractive and she was smart, but also because she was a drunk and she was easy. This one? She hoped for his sake he wasn’t as different as he seemed, because she always disappointed those men quickly or broke their hearts over time.”

— Chris Bohjalian

41. “It has helped me to understand more about who I am- the geography of my own soul.”

— Chris Bohjalian

42. “This was the pain that gouged out great holes in the soul, hollowing out self-esteem and cratering a person’s self respect.”

— Chris Bohjalian

43. “The reality is that most of North America knows next to nothing of the 20th centurys first genocide – the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the First World War.”

— Chris Bohjalian

44. “We always have choices. Isn’t that what Dante teaches us?”

— Chris Bohjalian

45. “She would hear the verbal balancing act: urgency mixed like gin amid the tonic of consideration.”

— Chris Bohjalian

46. “As a species, we’re either very resilient or super callous. I don’t know which.”

— Chris Bohjalian

47. “She cringed when she saw she needed a bikini wax – and cringed that she even got them in the first place. It wasn’t the pain. It was the whole idea she was raising her daughter in a world where pubic hair was a problem.”

— Chris Bohjalian

48. “I kind of understood at a young age that I didn’t play well with most other kids in the sandbox.”

— Chris Bohjalian

49. “As a novelist, there are three phone calls you never expect to receive in your lifetime because if you waited for them you would grow despairing – one calling from Stockholm with a Swedish accent, one from the NBA, and one from Oprah Winfrey.”

— Chris Bohjalian

50. “She was sent to the scaffold because she had a sharper tongue and a shrewder mind than her accusers. It is always the case when men hang women.”

— Chris Bohjalian